William Atkins
Thursday, 06 November 2008 20:03
Science -
Space
Page 1 of 2
According to two astronomers from Harvard University, hundreds of black holes could be present in the Milky Way galaxy, and could help us answer the question: How were we formed?
According to their ArXiv paper “
Star Clusters Around Recoiled Black Holes in the Milky Way Halo,” Professor
Abraham ("Avi") Loeb and fourth-year graduate student
Ryan O'Leary, both from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) state that massive black holes may be fairly abundant in our galaxy.
This might be so because some astronomers think that the Milky Way galaxy was formed from smaller galaxies that collided together.
These galaxies could have easily had black holes at their centers (like the Milky Way has today) and could have easily survived the collision.
O'Leary and Loeb used a
“large statistical sample of possible merger tree histories for the MW [Milky Way]
to estimate the expected number of recoiled BH [black hole]
remnants present in the MW halo today.” [ArXiv]
The concluded,
“We find that hundreds of BHs should remain bound to the MW halo after leaving their parent low-mass galaxies.”
Specifically, they conclude that around 300 of these black holes, and associated clusters of stars, are present in our Milky Way galaxy.
More details about the size of these black holes, and how they could be discovered are found on page two.
